Mauve was a product of creative chemistry, for it was a substance that had never existed before.  Perkin’s next great triumph, ten years later, was in rivaling Nature in the manufacture of one of her own choice products.  This is alizarin, the coloring matter contained in the madder root.  It was an ancient and oriental dyestuff, known as “Turkey red” or by its Arabic name of “alizari.”  When madder was introduced into France it became a profitable crop and at one time half a million tons a year were raised.  A couple of French chemists, Robiquet and Colin, extracted from madder its active principle, alizarin, in 1828, but it was not until forty years later that it was discovered that alizarin had for its base one of the coal-tar products, anthracene.  Then came a neck-and-neck race between Perkin and his German rivals to see which could discover a cheap process for making alizarin from anthracene.  The German chemists beat him to the patent office by one day!  Graebe and Liebermann filed their application for a patent on the sulfuric acid process as No. 1936 on June 25, 1869.  Perkin filed his for the same process as No. 1948 on June 26.  It had required twenty years to determine the constitution of alizarin, but within six months from its first synthesis the commercial process was developed and within a few years the sale of artificial alizarin reached $8,000,000 annually.  The madder fields of France were put to other uses and even the French soldiers became dependent on made-in-Germany dyes for their red trousers.  The British soldiers were placed in a similar situation as regards their red coats when after 1878 the azo scarlets put the cochineal bug out of business.

The modern chemist has robbed royalty of its most distinctive insignia, Tyrian purple.  In ancient times to be “porphyrogene,” that is “born to the purple,” was like admission to the Almanach de Gotha at the present time, for only princes or their wealthy rivals could afford to pay $600 a pound for crimsoned linen.  The precious dye is secreted by a snail-like shellfish of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.  From a tiny sac behind the head a drop of thick whitish liquid, smelling like garlic, can be extracted.  If this is spread upon cloth of any kind and exposed to air and sunlight it turns first green, next blue and then purple.  If the cloth is washed with soap—­that is, set by alkali—­it becomes a fast crimson, such as Catholic cardinals still wear as princes of the church.  The Phoenician merchants made fortunes out of their monopoly, but after the fall of Tyre it became one of “the lost arts”—­and accordingly considered by those whose faces are set toward the past as much more wonderful than any of the new arts.  But in 1909 Friedlander put an end to the superstition by analyzing Tyrian purple and finding that it was already known.  It was the same as a dye that had been prepared five years before by Sachs but had not come into commercial use because of its inferiority to others in the market.